Spirit Grooves Blogs

Published on January 21, 2014

I was gone for over a week and I have been catching up every day since we got back home, or trying to. There are a lot of topics and experiences I meant to share, but some of them may be just water over the dam at this point. In Ann Arbor the Ven. Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche gave a two-day intensive on the after-death bardo states, what exactly happens in the interval when we die.

I understand that death is not the most popular topic and, as we age, it either gets less popular or more popular. With me it is the latter, primarily because I want to at least see the preview for the bardo movie that I will have no choice but to experience sooner than many of you that are younger. At the very least I am curious.

There is also the fact that all of the Tibetan Buddhist teachers I know agree that being prepared for the bardo experience makes all of the difference. They also point out that each of us has been through the bardo innumerable times before, so in fact it is nothing new, but at the same time they add we may have done so with little or no realization as to what was happening to us at the time. The bottom line here is that there is in fact some urgency to all of this, so I am not just being a woose.

I paid close attention, even back in high school, to Hamlet's soliloquy and Shakespeare's lines that say:

"But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprise of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action."

I have studied the bardo on and off for years, and even helped to transcribe some teachings for a book on the subject that came out quite a while ago now, so my interest was there even as a younger person. But as a seventy-two-year-old, my interest is piqued and has been for a while. What happens beyond death and how do we get ready for it? I am very much a believer in the concept of going to meet my maker, even though I am a non-theist. In my case my "maker" is the nature of my own mind.

For a while (a long time ago) I found comfort in the idea that (somehow) me, myself, and I would be taking the journey beyond death, until I began to understand that the whole idea of the Self has no permanent existence. We don't take it with us when we go, but rather leave it behind, piece by piece, almost like a vapor trail. Or at least whatever self-remnants we have will not be useful. The Tibetan Buddhists explain that only the imprint of authentic mind training on our part will prove useful in the after-death bardo states. But there is another factor that I find even more unsettling.

The Buddhists point out that in our current state, now, living and attached to our body, we are relatively insensitive, at least insensitive compared to how we will be once we detach from the moorings of the body. At that time we will be very (very) much more sensitive in every way, a hundred or perhaps even 1,000 times more sensitive, there being no body to stabilize or weigh us down. And I thought I might be exaggerating until I how His Eminence Tai Situ Rinpoche put it, and it is a bit scary, so hang on:

"It is possible [to have awareness at that time]. My example for how it might be possible is something like this: I’m taken in an airplane to 35,000 feet high, and then [someone] puts a paper in my left hand and puts a pen in my right hand, and then throws me out of the airplane with no parachute, and I’m supposed to write the most beautiful poetry before I hit the ground. It would be possible, it would be possible, but very, very difficult. So, to remember that I am dead and to meditate and to realize or be aware of the “nature of the mind,” or to have compassion for all sentient beings, or to have devotion to buddhas and bodhisattvas and the lineage, in that state of mind, will be like that [like being thrown out of an airplane and writing poetry on the way down]; it will not be easy."

Hmmmm. That does sound a little difficult, does it not, and that coming from one of the great living Buddhist masters. So what does that tell little ole' me?

It tells me I have been just a little smug and probably won't just waltz into the bardo and feel right at home. I know that here in this country we plead ignorance to all of this bardo stuff, but the Tibetan Buddhists are all about it and speak from many centuries of experience studying the after-death states. I can't believe that these Tibetan teachers who have guided me so well for the last forty years or so would just be dead wrong about this one topic. They are telling me something, if I will listen. And I am trying to.

I could go on, but I am sure some of you want to skip to the last page of this blog and look for the ending or bottom line here, so without all the necessary details, here it is:

When all is said and done, what will stand us in good stead in the pivotal point in the after-death bardo state is the imprint and habits we gain by learning to work with and attain some stable control of our own mind. It is that control that we each will need when in the bardo we are so sensitive that our every thought will find us at its apex, where every "will o the wisp" sends us fluttering like a leaf in the wind, and when the anchor of the human body will no longer weigh us down, but like a kite without a tail we will be flung into the sky of the mind.

I wonder about that and what I can do now to prepare for it.

Your thoughts?